Ashwin's Reviews > Before Night Falls

"I thought I was going to die in the winter of 1987. For months on end I had been having terrible fevers. I finally went to a doctor and he told me I had AIDS."

Thus, from the start, the tragic frame was fixed, wherein with garish colours, baroque sketches and bold brushstrokes, Arenas draws up throughout these pages, a picture far removed from the idyllic setting that some come to seek in Cuba. Born into a peasant family in the province of Oriente, in 1943, as an impoverished child, Arenas knew the misery of indigence, eating dirt, climbing trees, surrounded by fields and mountain animals, with a mother, abandoned by her husband. As a teenager growing up in the Cuban farmyard, he recognised his sexual attraction for men compelling him to fight a harsh and stringent personal war in order to prove his existence under the dictatorial regime of Castro, that imprisoned him for his counter-revolutionary writings and sexual brazenness. Much of the book focuses on his numerous erotic encounters midst the harsh repression of sexual dissidents, anti-revolutionaries and political writers within the country. The consuming readability of this memoir is a testament to Reinaldo's skill as a poet. His words flow on the page, often vacillating between humour and horror, between pain and pleasure.

After reading this memoir, the ways to describe Reinaldo Arenas feel endless; everything from the libertarian to the tragic hero, to the greatest voice of denunciation from Cuba. But what can be easily said without any room for disagreement, was that Reinaldo Arenas was a brave soul. His memoir, Before Night Falls, an extraordinary document, a testament to artistic discipline and integrity in the face of oppression. As with all incredible people in history, they are not born, they are made. And Arenas is a product of the bloody storm that led him to this path, of broken dreams and disillusions, but of someone who almost always refused to be anyone other than himself.